Our gospel today from Luke is a precious moment in the life of the nascent Church. We see Jesus praying, with his followers around him. And he tells them—he tells us—about who he is and about who we are. Think of it as a sort of family portrait.
Jesus is praying. All of our life, all we do, who we are, centers on our conversation with the Father. Jesus said, “I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me” (Jn. 8:28). He did nothing without being certain that it was the Father’s will. Jesus laid hands on no one, he preached no sermon, performed no miracle, yes, even did not hand himself over to be crucified, before he first prayed to the Father.
How many times do I do thing on my own, without the Father? I go and make plans and commitments, and how many of those are of God? “But Fr. Jon Mark,” you say, “I make plans for work and my employer is the State of Maryland. I’d get in trouble. It’s a secular workplace.” Your job and my job are only as secular as we let it be. Remember, you are a priest. You are an icon, a representation of Jesus Christ within the world. When you are living your Christian vocation, you can’t help but de-secularize the world.
Now, how is that practically done? How do we know what is God’s will? Talk to Him. Read His Sacred Scriptures. Learn what God sounds like, what kinds of things He does, what His expectations are, what His law is. When we permeate our lives with God’s Word, through the Bible, through prayer, listening to His Holy Spirit, our minds shift. We are transformed. Our ways become like His ways, our thoughts become like His thoughts. In doing so, we look like one of the family.
Not only is Jesus praying, he’s doing so in private. He does not pray for the world to see; he prays in “lonely places.” Why should he seek solitude? Because this is not for the world to see and hear. This is a private moment, just for the children of God. Jesus is about to pull back the veil, to reveal a little more about who he is.
It’s also significant that, despite Jesus being alone, the disciples were with Him. Jesus’ seclusion was from the world. His disciples are heirs according to the promise, Abraham’s seed; they are his body, the Church. Jesus can be alone with the Father and still have the disciples present, because they are members of his body. He is the head and the disciples are the hands, feet, eyes, ears, all the various parts of the body, of His body. We, the disciples of this age, also share in this intimate, quiet time of Jesus with the Father. “Through his own glory and goodness, he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature” (2 Pe. 1:4). You are branches of the one true vine, a chip off the old block!
Jesus must help us understand better who He is and subsequently who we are. So He asked the disciples, “‘Who do the crowds say I am?’ They replied, ‘Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life.’” The disciples had been listening to the same rumors as Herod, for we read in verses 7–9 these same suppositions. Herod himself rejected these ideas.
Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do you say I am?” I’m not going to preach to you that you need to answer here and now this question, “Who do I say that Jesus is?” although if you have never made that decision, I pray that you wrestle with it, because how you answer that one question will change your entire life. But that’s another sermon. Jesus here is asking his disciples if they adhere to the beliefs of the crowd, or if there is some other possibility, another option. What the crowds say and what the disciples say is set up one against the other.
How does Peter answer the question, “Who do you say I am?” He responds, “The Christ of God.” Now we see the fruit of Jesus’ prayer. Imagine the scene. Jesus with the disciples, communing with the Father. And as he kneels there, he turns his head toward them and asks, “Who do the crowds say I am?” After hearing the answers, he returns to prayer for a moment, entreating His Father that every blessing would be poured out upon the twelve and their eyes opened. And then He turns back and asks, “Who do you say I am.” And what joy was His on hearing Peter’s response! His prayers answered and the disciples’ eyes opened, if even just a little. With their eyes opened a mere crack, Jesus could talk to them about the blinding radiance that they now perceived. Peter’s response was an answer to Jesus praying. As Matthew tells us in his Gospel, “This was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven” (Mt. 16:17). Peter had no way of knowing that Jesus was the Christ by his own flesh and blood, through his own power of reason.
When human eyes gaze upon Jesus, they see a man, just a man. Human eyes are not opened to Jesus being God. They misunderstand our family portrait. Do you watch Discovery Channel? There are scientists who take events of the Bible and “figure them out.” A few months back, there was a show about the Exodus. All manner of explanations were provided, but each one required a revision to the biblical account. Instead of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea on dry land, they walked along a shoal along the shoreline. Also, you may have heard that some biblical “scholars” prefer to view the miracle of the Feeding of the 5000 as a miracle of generosity, where one boy’s humble gift shamed the crowd into sharing what they already had. Human understanding of Jesus is like that; it changes facts to fit the hypothesis. Human vision cannot penetrate the mysteries of God by itself; it is inadequate. What if miracles are truly miraculous?
And you and I do not have the ability to reason our way to acknowledging Jesus as Lord and Savior. We can’t force our way into the family. Faith in Jesus is a gift, a grace given by God the Father. Even now, || the power to confess that you believe in one Lord Jesus Christ is not your own; it is a gift. || Think about that. Every Sunday when we recite the Nicene Creed, and say, “I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,” the power to say those words and mean it—to really mean it—is a gift that we have received. Flesh and blood have not revealed this to us, but it comes from our Father in Heaven.
Jesus strictly warns the disciples not to tell anyone that he is the Christ of God. Doesn’t that seem strange? Jesus, who in Matthew’s telling of the event says that Jesus blessed Simon Peter for professing this revelation, instructs the twelve to keep silent. Was Jesus uncertain that he was the Christ, or was he ashamed of it? Why this command to keep quiet? As we’ve already discussed, the knowledge that Jesus is the Christ was not Peter’s, it was not man’s; that knowledge belongs to God. For the disciples to willy-nilly tell it to the world before the resurrection would be premature. Until Jesus breathed onto the disciples to receive the Holy Spirit, until the Spirit of God descended upon them at Pentecost, Peter could no more share the Good News that Jesus is the Christ than he could restrain himself from denying Jesus. It wasn’t his knowledge; it wasn’t in his power. But after Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit enlightened the hearts of the disciples, this Gospel is proclaimed.
Another reason that Jesus didn’t want it proclaimed that he was the Messiah is that the world would not understand what this meant. They are not part of the family. Even the twelve needed further instruction regarding who the Messiah is and what he is come to do. Judea in Jesus day was under Roman occupation. The Jews were a people oppressed; not necessarily forbidden to exercise their religion within their family and “religious” structures, but the Jewish understanding of state demands that God, Yahweh, be its head, and that Torah be the Law, the guiding principle. Under Rome, the Jews followed Yahweh under the limitations of Roman rulers. There was general freedom of religion for all peoples, but the Promised Land was polluted and corrupted by false religions, where tolerance was the rule.
The Jews, therefore, would be tempted to confine their view of Messiah to a political savior and, while Jesus did come to sanctify the entirety of the world including its political aspects, he did not come to overthrow any kingdom less than the kingdom of darkness, the kingdom of this world, the kingdom of all that is opposed to God. He came to free his people from all that enslaved them, not just to loose them from one particular master. The crowds could not understand God’s awesome plan.
Jesus had to, therefore, elaborate on what the true Messiah does. He had to point out the details in the family portrait. He said, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day raised to life.” The disciples were looking for a Christ who would ride into Jerusalem mounted on a horse, a conquering king. Jesus shows them a Christ who will be rejected and killed, and yet one who will be vindicated when he is raised from death to life.
This is the “Christ of God,” one who is “obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Php. 2:8). The Christ of God will suffer in order to bring about the salvation that God intends. The world’s rejection of the Christ will be costly. The Christ who “does not consider equality with God something to be grasped at” will be rejected as unworthy of the title. But “God shall exalt him to the highest place and give him the name that is above every name!” Jesus had to show the disciples this, for they would not have come to it on their own.
Likewise, Jesus shows the disciples that “no servant is greater than his master.” He shows that the suffering servant is a family trait. As Christ is rejected, so he says, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself.” Self-denial does not simply mean that you give up eating chocolate cake in Lent. Self denial is “not considering equality with God something to be grasped;” that is to say, it’s letting Him be God, and me be me. Self-denial is “making myself nothing and taking the very nature of a servant;” that is, being submitted to what God calls me to do. It is “being obedient unto death, even death on a cross”— even death by allowing the world (including my friends and colleagues) to ridicule me for not jumping into the same flood of sin; even death by saying no to things that keep me away from the Lord’s house on the Lord’s day; even death by giving up my goals and hopes in this life, so that I can focus on His goals, which are for life eternal. Jesus said that the Christ must be killed, and we too must take up our cross and follow him.
But just as the Christ was raised to life on the third day, our suffering and trials and afflictions are not in vain; they are not the end of our story. Jesus tells us, “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.” We don’t beat our bodies for any masochistic pleasure or out of futility. We know for certain that our self-denial—our cross bearing—will be our salvation. We are willing to lose our lives, not because they are worthless, but precisely because they are priceless. Only in giving up ourselves to God’s, losing our hold on our lives, only in this do we preserve ourselves. Only in giving as Christ gave do we become transformed into his likeness.
I’d like to leave you with one final point. In verse 23, to whom does Jesus addresses himself? Is it to the twelve, the 72, or any other limited group? No, he speaks to the entire group, to Christians of all time, all nations, all states of life, what the Christian walk must be like. Everything that Jesus has said is not directed to sages, martyrs, apostles, gurus, or any other super-saint category. The last line of the great hymn, “I sing a song of the saints of God,” puts it like this: “For the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.” You, by virtue of the Holy Spirit given to you at baptism and strengthened at confirmation, you—yes, you—are God’s super-hero—in your Superman pajamas, saying, “Daddy, watch me,” as he throws you up in the air so high that you can fly! And that’s the family picture that your Father in Heaven keeps on his refrigerator!
